To show other people's usernames you'll need to imbed a php script into your signature. Then when you have posted into a thread, you'll get hits from various people. If you watch the referrers you can figure out the referrer of when someone posts to your thread.
So what you do, is when the image is loaded, you check for that unique referrer type, then load the post with a script, and extract the username from it. Then store the username with the IP.
Then when the embedded script gets loaded, check the ip against your database of nicknames, and use something like ImageMagick or GD to print out the username.
*hint: This is also an easy way to compare IPs to nicknames and see what fake nicknames people are using.
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